AILEEN HARVEY

About

My work focuses on the experience of place: from landscapes to more intimate indoor spaces. I use walking and material abstraction to make drawings or analogue photographs that look for a balance between subjective experience and a wider sense of the physical landscape. The works are often built around small details and structures, causal or hierarchical, that belong to a landscape. They also refer to recounted experience and memory, and the role of visual imagery (whether primary or supporting) in these forms of experience.

In developing a work, I am looking for ways to engage closely and attentively with a place: a kind of digging in of my toes. Working in series and using a set of rules is part of the making and it then becomes the structure of the work. I also think of these rule-guided processes as particular methods of gathering data, aimed at two things: emphasising the landscape's own agency and material nature; and acknowledging the contingency and limitations of my experience, in time, weather and chance, as well as in my body, language, history and imagination.